Palin a GOP star, but little liked by center

By: David Paul Kuhn
Politico
December 1, 2008

With his runoff race ending on Tuesday, Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss called in the party's big guns—and Sarah Palin answered the call, stumping across the state today and tomorrow. It's a clear sign of her stature within the party.

Palin’s flash emergence on the national stage has left her as well positioned as any Republican to make a serious run for the GOP nomination in 2012, yet waning support from the political center may threaten her presidential ambitions, according to a Politico analysis of public polling.

Palin is atop a field of ten Republicans in a hypothetical 2012 matchup, including 2008 primary candidates Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, according to a recent Gallup poll of Republican voters.

Fully two thirds of Republicans, including Republican-leaning independents, want Palin to run for president in 2012, twice as many as back Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who has already made one post-election visit to Iowa, and about 20 points ahead of former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

(More here.)

'The Time Has Come to Say These Things'

"We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning a withdrawal from nearly all, if not all, of the [occupied] territories."

By Ehud Olmert
New York Review of Books
(TM Note: see Roger Cohen piece, below.)

On the eve of the Jewish New Year, Israel's most popular daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth, published an extended interview of lame-duck prime minister Ehud Olmert by journalists Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer. Olmert is a former mayor of Jerusalem (1993–2003), member of the Knesset, and cabinet-level official. In 2005, he left the right-wing Likud party and joined the Kadima party, a centrist alliance formed by then prime minister Ariel Sharon in the wake of Israel's "disengagement" from the Gaza Strip. Olmert, who served as deputy prime minister in the Kadima-led government, assumed the premiership in 2006 when Sharon suffered a stroke. He announced his intention to resign this July amid a growing corruption scandal and a dismal public approval rating that never recovered from his failed 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.

On September 21, upon tendering his official resignation, Olmert became head of an interim government and will hold that position until a new prime minister is sworn in. Under Israeli law, the prime minister–designate, Kadima's Tzipi Livni, had forty-two days from the resignation to form a workable ruling coalition. On October 26, Livni announced that she had failed to do so. A general election will take place next year.

The following are excerpts from the Yedioth interview, which Olmert gave hours after handing in his letter of resignation.

(Continued here.)

Deficits and the Future

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT

Right now there’s intense debate about how aggressive the United States government should be in its attempts to turn the economy around. Many economists, myself included, are calling for a very large fiscal expansion to keep the economy from going into free fall. Others, however, worry about the burden that large budget deficits will place on future generations.

But the deficit worriers have it all wrong. Under current conditions, there’s no trade-off between what’s good in the short run and what’s good for the long run; strong fiscal expansion would actually enhance the economy’s long-run prospects.

The claim that budget deficits make the economy poorer in the long run is based on the belief that government borrowing “crowds out” private investment — that the government, by issuing lots of debt, drives up interest rates, which makes businesses unwilling to spend on new plant and equipment, and that this in turn reduces the economy’s long-run rate of growth. Under normal circumstances there’s a lot to this argument.

But circumstances right now are anything but normal. Consider what would happen next year if the Obama administration gave in to the deficit hawks and scaled back its fiscal plans.

(More here.)

Try Tough Love, Hillary

By Roger Cohen
NYT

Imagine Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, saying this to Barack Obama:

“The United States has been wrong to write Israel a blank check every year; wrong to turn a blind eye to the settlements in the West Bank; wrong not to be more explicit about the need to divide Jerusalem; wrong to equip us with weaponry so sophisticated we now believe military might is the answer to all our problems; and wrong in not helping us reach out to Syria. Your chosen secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said during the campaign that ‘the United States stands with Israel, now and forever.’ Well, that’s not good enough. You need to stand against us sometimes so we can avoid the curse of eternal militarism.”

Perhaps that seems unimaginable. But Olmert has already said something close to this. In a frank September interview with the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, reprinted this month by The New York Review of Books, the Israeli leader chose to exit with a mea culpa for his country’s policies.

Those policies have been encouraged by the Bush administration, whose war on terror was embraced by the Israeli government as a means to frame Israel’s confrontation with the Palestinians as part of the same struggle. No matter that Al Qaeda and the Palestinian national movement are distinct. The facile conflation got Bush in lock step with whatever Israel did.

So, by saying Israel has been wrong, Olmert was also saying the United States has been wrong, even if he never mentioned America.

(More here.)

A Handpicked Obama Team for a Shift in Foreign Policy

By DAVID E. SANGER
NYT

WASHINGTON — When President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team on Monday, it will include two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

(More here.)

Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security

By Spencer S. Hsu and Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 1, 2008

The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.

The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said.

There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement.

But the Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

(More here.)

Paul Krugman explains Keynes to George Will

NYT

The greatness of Keynes …

… is illustrated by the trouble people who consider themselves well informed have, to this day, in understanding the basic principles of how a depressed economy works.

The key to Keynes’s contribution was his realization that liquidity preference — the desire of individuals to hold liquid monetary assets — can lead to situations in which effective demand isn’t enough to employ all the economy’s resources. When you don’t understand that principle, you end up writing stuff like this:

Obama’s “rescue plan for the middle class” includes a tax credit for businesses “for each new employee they hire” in America over the next two years. The assumption is that businesses will create jobs that would not have been created without the subsidy. If so, the subsidy will suffuse the economy with inefficiencies — labor costs not justified by value added.

That is, if the private sector wouldn’t have created a job on its own, that job shouldn’t have been created — whereas the real choice is between having workers doing something and being uselessly, destructively unemployed.

(More here. Here is the Will piece from Sunday.)

Never Let Them See You Sweat

NYT Week in Review
By KATE ZERNIKE

The economy jolts and stumbles, wars slog on in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the horrors of a new terrorist attack blanket the news and draw frayed attention yet again to our precarious alliances in the world. The watchword for the holidays is subdued; certainly not much inspires celebration.

Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that to lead us in crisis, Americans elected a man repeatedly recognized for his uncommon calmness. More than ever, we crave stability, a steady hand, the reassuring face on television.

We even elevate such equilibrium to the superhuman: calm, as applied to No Drama Obama, often comes linked to the modifier “preternatural.”

But the calm temperament is not so superhuman, nor is it entirely the gift of the chosen few. It can be cultivated, even as the world cleaves around us.

So how do we get there without a steady diet of beta blockers and Xanax? Calm, per se, doesn’t appear in the taxonomy of those who study personality and temperament. People we might colloquially describe as calm are classified as low on the scale of neuroticism — a scale everyone is measured on, to a greater or lesser degree.

(More here.)

Growing research suggests being gay is not 'a choice'

By Mike Swift
San Jose Mercury News

Compared with straight men, gay men are more likely to be left-handed, to be the younger siblings of older brothers, and to have hair that whorls in a counterclockwise direction.

Researchers are finding common biological traits among gay men, feeding a growing consensus that sexual orientation is an inborn combination of genetic and environmental factors that largely decide a person's sexual attractions before they are born.

Such findings — including a highly anticipated study this winter — would further inform the debate over whether homosexuality is innate or a choice, an undercurrent of the recent Proposition 8 campaign in which television commercials warned that "schools would begin teaching second-graders that boys could marry boys," suggesting homosexuality would then spread.

Some scientists say the political and moral debate over same-sex marriage frequently strayed from established scientific evidence, including comments by vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that homosexuality is "a choice" and "a decision."

Until 2007, CNN polls had found that a majority of Americans believed gay people could change their sexual orientation if they chose to; it was only last year that a majority for the first time said homosexuality was an inborn trait. Christian groups such as Exodus International argue "that homosexuals who desire to change can do so."

One prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Spitzer of Columbia University, found controversial evidence that therapy can cause some gay people to change to a heterosexual orientation, although the study concluded that a "complete change" was uncommon.

(More here.)

Violence kills hundreds. India? No, Nigeria

Nigerian Riots Leave 300 Dead
Associated Press

JOS, Nigeria -- Mobs burned homes, churches and mosques Saturday in a second day of riots, as the death toll rose to more than 300 in the worst sectarian violence in Africa's most populous nation in years.

Sheikh Khalid Abubakar, the imam at the city's main mosque, said more than 300 dead bodies were brought there on Saturday alone and 183 could be seen laying near the building waiting to be interred.

Those killed in the Christian community would not likely be taken to the city mosque, raising the possibility that the total death toll could be much higher. The city morgue wasn't immediately accessible Saturday.

Police spokesman Bala Kassim said there were "many dead," but couldn't cite a firm number.

(More here.)

Negotiations Won't Stop Iran

By David Ignatius
WashPost

WASHINGTON -- Absent some last-minute fireworks, President Bush will leave office with a kind of double-failure on Iran: Administration hard-liners haven't checked Tehran's drive to acquire nuclear weapons technology, and moderates haven't engaged Iran in negotiation and dialogue.

The strategic balance between the two countries is the opposite of what Bush had hoped to accomplish: Iran is stronger than it was eight years ago and the United States, fighting costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is weaker. Iran spurns America's carrots, and dismisses its sticks.

President-elect Obama wants to open a serious dialogue with Tehran. That's a worthy aspiration, but there's little reason now to believe that it will succeed. Iranian officials are bellicose in public, and privately even the advocates of negotiation warn that the time may not be ripe for a broad strategic discussion. Iran is heading toward a presidential election of its own next June, which will complicate any diplomatic opening.

And as the clock ticks, Iran moves inexorably toward becoming a nuclear weapons state. Despite four U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning the Iranian program, the West seems powerless to stop it.

To see how the strategic situation with Iran has worsened, it's useful to recall what has happened over the past eight years. Graham Allison, the director of Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, suggested this accounting during a meeting this week in Cambridge.

(More here.)

The GOP's McCarthy gene

Think Goldwater is the father of conservatism? Think again.
By Neal Gabler
(TM comment: Good piece but he doesn't give enough "credit" to Richard Nixon/Pat Buchanan for their racist Southern Strategy, which further aroused the oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP.)

November 30, 2008

Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch. To determine the answer, it helps to understand exactly how Republicans arrived at this spot in the first place.

The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how the story goes.

But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

The basic problem with the Goldwater tale is that it focuses on ideology and movement building, which few voters have ever really cared about, while the McCarthy tale focuses on electoral strategy, which is where Republicans have excelled.

(More here.)

Joint Chiefs Chairman 'Very Positive' After Meeting With Obama

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 30, 2008

Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went unarmed into his first meeting with the new commander in chief -- no aides, no PowerPoint presentation, no briefing books. Summoned nine days ago to President-elect Barack Obama's Chicago transition office, Mullen showed up with just a pad, a pen and a desire to take the measure of his incoming boss.

There was little talk of exiting Iraq or beefing up the U.S. force in Afghanistan; the one-on-one, 45-minute conversation ranged from the personal to the philosophical. Mullen came away with what he wanted: a view of the next president as a non-ideological pragmatist who was willing to both listen and lead. After the meeting, the chairman "felt very good, very positive," according to Mullen spokesman Capt. John Kirby.

As Obama prepares to announce his national security team tomorrow, he faces a military that has long mistrusted Democrats and is particularly wary of a young, intellectual leader with no experience in uniform, who once called Iraq a "dumb" war. Military leaders have all heard his pledge to withdraw most combat forces from Iraq within 16 months -- sooner than commanders on the ground have recommended -- and his implied criticism of the Afghanistan war effort during the Bush administration.

(More here.)

'I was told to kill to my last breath': Captured terrorist's account of Mumbai massacre reveals plan was to kill 5,000

By Ian Gallagher
Daily Mail
Last updated at 10:37 AM on 30th November 2008

The only terrorist captured alive after the Mumbai massacre has given police the first full account of the extraordinary events that led to it – revealing he was ordered to ‘kill until the last breath’.

Azam Amir Kasab, 21, from Pakistan, said the attacks were meticulously planned six months ago and were intended to kill 5,000 people.

He revealed that the ten terrorists, who were highly trained in marine assault and crept into the city by boat, had planned to blow up the Taj Mahal Palace hotel after first executing British and American tourists and then taking hostages.

Mercifully, the group, armed with plastic explosives, underestimated the strength of the 105-year-old building’s solid foundations.

As it is, their deadly attacks have left close to 200 confirmed dead, with the toll expected to rise to nearly 300 once the hotel has been fully searched by security forces.

Yesterday, Kasab chillingly went through details of Wednesday night’s killing spree across the city, which ended when he was cornered by police.

He pretended to be dead, which probably saved his life. It was only when he was being transferred to hospital by ambulance that his accompanying officer noticed he was still breathing.

Once inside Nair Hospital, Kasab, who suffered only minor injuries, told medical staff: ‘I do not want to die. Please put me on saline.’

And as Indian commandos ended the bloody 59-hour siege at the Taj yesterday by killing the last three Islamic gunmen, baby-faced Kasab was dispassionately detailing the background to the mayhem.

(More here, including pictures.)

NYT editorial: Bailing Away

The federal government is going for broke in an attempt to avert the type of calamitous financial collapse that led to the Great Depression. No one would fault the objective, but throwing money at the problem is becoming an end in itself.

Last week alone, while everyone was still arguing whether a $25 billion loan to the Big Three carmakers would be money down a sinkhole, the government committed more than $1 trillion to prop up Citigroup and to try to spur lending to consumers and home buyers. Moves to stabilize the system this year have put Americans in harm’s way from possible losses on nearly $8 trillion pledged in loans, guarantees and investments to financial firms. And the crisis is far from over.

This page has consistently held that the government must intervene in markets when failure to do so would cause even greater economic harm. The impending collapse of Citi or an unrelenting credit freeze demand intervention. But good crisis management also requires that the calamity of the moment not be allowed to overwhelm good governing. Unfortunately, that is not the case now.

Even, as the rescue tab rises, taxpayers are not being adequately informed or protected. There is as yet no effort to deal effectively with the underlying causes of the problem, especially mass mortgage defaults that feed bank losses. And officials seem to think urgency to act absolves them from considering the longer-term implications of the actions they take.

(More here.)

He's Not Black

By Marie Arana
WashPost
Sunday, November 30, 2008

He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

(More here.)

Players Gamble on Honesty, Security of Internet Betting

Inside Bet: Security of Internet Gambling

David Paredes, 29, is an online poker player who helped break-up a scam by figuring out that the Internet sites used secret software to detect what the players hands contained. (Photo: Kevin Clark/The Post)

By Gilbert M. Gaul
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 30, 2008

Whenever Todd Witteles signed on to an Internet poker site, the first thing he did was look around for inexperienced players. One day in August 2007, the Las Vegas poker pro thought he had found an easy mark on AbsolutePoker.com.

A newcomer using the name "Greycat" was making unusually big bets off weak hands. "He seemed like a bad player who had just been getting incredibly lucky," Witteles recalled. "When you see someone like Greycat, you stop everything you're doing to play."

But in a series of one-on-one games, Witteles quickly found himself down $15,000. Worse, Greycat began taunting him. Soon, some of Witteles's online poker friends began wondering publicly whether Greycat was cheating. It was almost as though he could see Witteles's hole cards.

It turned out that was exactly what Greycat was doing. After months of pressure from a small group of players who took it upon themselves to investigate the claims, AbsolutePoker was forced to admit that a cheater had cracked its software, and it refunded $1.6 million to Witteles and dozens of other players.

(More here.)

Economic rescue could cost $8.5 trillion

Heavy spending to battle the financial crisis is unlikely to abate soon. Analysts say next year's deficit could top $1 trillion.
By Jim Puzzanghera
LA Times

November 30, 2008

Reporting from Washington — With its decision last week to pump an additional $1 trillion into the financial crisis, the government eliminated any doubt that the nation is on a wartime footing in the battle to shore up the economy. The strategy now -- and in the coming Obama administration -- is essentially the win-at-any-cost approach previously adopted only to wage a major war.

And that means no hesitation in pledging to spend previously almost unimaginable sums of money and running up federal budget deficits on a scale not seen since World War II.

Indeed, analysts warn that the nation's next financial crisis could come from the staggering cost of battling the current one.

Just last week, new initiatives added $600 billion to lower mortgage rates, $200 billion to stimulate consumer loans and nearly $300 billion to steady Citigroup, the banking conglomerate. That pushed the potential long-term cost of the government's varied economic rescue initiatives, including direct loans and loan guarantees, to an estimated total of $8.5 trillion -- half of the entire economic output of the U.S. this year.

Nor has the cash register stopped ringing. President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are expected to enact a stimulus package of $500 billion to $700 billion soon after he takes office in January.

(More here.)

Gay Marriage and a Moral Minority

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

We now know that blacks probably didn’t tip the balance for Proposition 8. Myth busted. However, the fact remains that a strikingly high percentage of blacks said they voted to ban same-sex marriage in California. Why?

There was one very telling (and virtually ignored) statistic in CNN’s exit poll data that may shed some light: There were far more black women than black men, and a higher percentage of them said that they voted for the measure than the men. How wide was the gap? According to the exit poll, 70 percent of all blacks said that they voted for the proposition. But 75 percent of black women did. There weren’t enough black men in the survey to provide a reliable percentage for them. However, one can mathematically deduce that of the raw number of survey respondents, nearly twice as many black women said that they voted for it than black men.

Why? Here are my theories:

(1) Blacks are much more likely than whites to attend church, according to a Gallup report, and black women are much more likely to attend church than black men. Anyone who has ever been to a black church can attest to the disparity in the pews. And black women’s church attendance may be increasing.

(More here.)

A Penny for My Thoughts?

By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT

PASADENA, Calif.

I visited the future, and it was wearing a bow tie and calling itself “Thomas Edison.”

The newspaper business is not only crumpling up, James Macpherson informed me here, it is probably holding “a one-way ticket to Bangalore.”

Macpherson — bow-tied and white-haired but boyish-looking at 53 — should know. He pioneered “glocal” news — outsourcing Pasadena coverage to India at Pasadena Now, his daily online “newspaperless,” as he likes to call it. Indians are writing about everything from the Pasadena Christmas tree-lighting ceremony to kitchen remodeling to city debates about eliminating plastic shopping bags.

“Everyone has to get ready for what’s inevitable — like King Canute and the tide coming in — and that’s really my message to the industry,” the editor and publisher said. “Many newspapers are dead men walking. They’re going to be replaced by smaller, nimbler, multiple Internet-centric kinds of things such as what I’m pioneering.”

(More here.)

Terrorism That’s Personal

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NYT

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan

Terrorism in this part of the world usually means bombs exploding or hotels burning, as the latest horrific scenes from Mumbai attest. Yet alongside the brutal public terrorism that fills the television screens, there is an equally cruel form of terrorism that gets almost no attention and thrives as a result: flinging acid on a woman’s face to leave her hideously deformed.

Here in Pakistan, I’ve been investigating such acid attacks, which are commonly used to terrorize and subjugate women and girls in a swath of Asia from Afghanistan through Cambodia (men are almost never attacked with acid). Because women usually don’t matter in this part of the world, their attackers are rarely prosecuted and acid sales are usually not controlled. It’s a kind of terrorism that becomes accepted as part of the background noise in the region.

This month in Afghanistan, men on motorcycles threw acid on a group of girls who dared to attend school. One of the girls, a 17-year-old named Shamsia, told reporters from her hospital bed: “I will go to my school even if they kill me. My message for the enemies is that if they do this 100 times, I am still going to continue my studies.”

When I met Naeema Azar, a Pakistani woman who had once been an attractive, self-confident real estate agent, she was wearing a black cloak that enveloped her head and face. Then she removed the covering, and I flinched.

(Continued here. Video link is here.)

Profiles in punditry, Peggy Noonan

by kos
from DailyKos

Sat Nov 29, 2008

I love coming across great punditry like this, from Peggy Noonan in February 2006:

Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

A Russian Solution To The Somali Pirates

National Defense University

November 25, 2008: Russia is planning to send more warships to the Somali coast, along with some commandos and a particularly Russian style of counter-piracy operations. In other words, the Russians plan to go old school on the Somali pirates, and use force to rescue ships currently held, and act ruthlessly against real or suspected pirates it encounters at sea.

This could cause diplomatic problems with the other nations providing warships for counter-piracy operations off the Somali coast. That's because the current ships have, so far, followed a policy of not attempting rescue operations (lest captive sailors get hurt) and not firing on pirates unless fired on first. Russia believes this approach only encourages the pirates.

(More here.)

AIG Pulls Fast One -- "Cash Awards" Going To Managers

Jonathan Tasini
HuffPost

When you are a pro at a scam -- the definition of "scam" also can be found under the term "insurance industry" -- you know how to try to pull a fast one. And AIG is trying to pull one -- under cover of the holidays. Check this out.

You may remember that AIG -- which is afloat only thanks to a bailout by you, the taxpayer, to the tune of $152 billion and counting -- made a whole lot of public relations when its top seven executives agreed not to take bonuses this year.

Well, on the eve of Thanksgiving, obviously knowing the markets would be closed on the holiday and obviously knowing that just before the holiday few people would pay attention, AIG actually notified regulators that, well, yes, bonuses would be given out, as Bloomberg News and The Financial Times reports today:

(More here.)

Putting a Face on Big Auto

By BOB HERBERT
NYT

If we were interested in making the best possible decisions with regard to the U.S. auto industry, someone like Rich Breen would be seen as the face of the industry, not the chief executives of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

Mr. Breen is a 55-year-old member of the Teamsters union, a car hauler who delivers new vehicles for the Big Three automakers. He lives in Clinton Township, a suburb of Detroit, and he is horrified by the steady erosion of the American standard of living that he sees each day as he makes his rounds.

“I see the tool and die industry dying in the light industrial areas,” he told me in an interview just before Thanksgiving. “I see the clientele decreasing in the local barbershops, the hardware stores and the restaurants. That’s all happening from the first phase of the downsizing in the auto industry, the cutbacks and layoffs that have already occurred. It’s not from the current crisis.

“The community around me is deteriorating before my eyes. I hear people saying if G.M., Ford or Chrysler shuts down it wouldn’t affect them. They have no idea. It would have a domino effect that we’ve never had before in the United States.

(More here.)

NYT editorial: Medicare’s Too Costly Private Plans

Private health insurance plans were supposed to bring better care and lower costs to elderly patients covered by Medicare. Instead they have increased the cost and complexity of the program without improving care, according to new analyses published by the respected journal Health Affairs. Congress clearly has more work to do to remove unjustified subsidies that prop up many of the most inefficient private plans.

Back in the 1980s, private plans — known as health maintenance organizations — were seen as a savior for Medicare. They could provide the same or better services as traditional fee-for-service Medicare, but because of managed care they could do it at a lower cost. Over the years Congress brought other, less managed private plans into Medicare, and in 2003 the Republican-dominated Congress substantially increased government payments to private plans.

Medicare currently pays the private plans — now called the Medicare Advantage program — 13 percent more on average than the same services would cost in the traditional fee-for-service program. Some of the added payments are used to provide extra benefits for enrollees, like reduced cost-sharing or reduced premiums for such extra benefits as vision and dental care.

The added value averages more than $1,100 a year per patient. Not surprisingly, that makes them attractive to individuals and employers seeking coverage for retirees. It has fueled an explosive growth in enrollments. Almost a quarter of all Medicare beneficiaries, more than 10 million people, are enrolled in private plans.

(More here.)

NYT editorial: The Prop 8 Campaign Money

California’s fair-elections commission is investigating a complaint against the Mormon Church’s role in campaigning for Proposition 8, which made marriage illegal between people of the same sex. Based on the facts that have come out so far, the state is right to look into whether the church broke state laws by failing to report campaign-related expenditures.

Proposition 8, which California voters passed on Nov. 4, overturned a ruling by the California Supreme Court and wrote discrimination against one particular group of people into the State Constitution. After it passed, tens of thousands of people rallied in cities across the country in support of same-sex marriage. The California Supreme Court said recently that it would review whether Proposition 8 was constitutional.

Mormons were a major force behind the ballot measure. Individual church members contributed millions of dollars and acted as campaign foot soldiers. The church itself also played an unusually large role. Michael R. Otterson, the managing director of public affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the full name of the Mormons’ church — said that while the church speaks out on other issues, like abortion, “we don’t get involved to the degree we did on this.”

Fred Karger, the founder of a group called Californians Against Hate, who filed the complaint, contends that the Mormon Church provided significant contributions to the pro-Proposition 8 campaign that it did not report, as state law requires. The Fair Political Practices Commission of California is investigating, among other things, commercials, out-of-state phone banks and a Web site sponsored by the church.

(More here.)

National Security Pick: From a Marine to a Mediator

By HELENE COOPER
NYT

WASHINGTON — James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, was among a mostly Republican crowd watching a presidential debate in October when Barack Obama casually mentioned that he got a lot of his advice on foreign policy from General Jones.

“Explain yourself!” some of the Republicans demanded, as General Jones later recalled it.

He did not. A 6-foot-5 Marine Corps commandant with the looks of John Wayne, General Jones is not given to talking about his political bent, be it Republican or Democrat. And yet, he is Mr. Obama’s choice for national security adviser, a job that will make him the main foreign policy sounding board and sage to a president with relatively little foreign policy experience.

The selection of General Jones will elevate another foreign policy moderate to a team that will include Robert M. Gates, a carry-over from the Bush administration, as defense secretary and Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. By bringing a military man to the White House, Mr. Obama may be trying to cement an early bond with military leaders who regard him with some uneasiness, particularly over his call for rapid troop reductions in Iraq.

But General Jones will also be expected to mediate between rivals, particularly in dealing with Mr. Gates, who has his own power base at the Pentagon, and with Mrs. Clinton, who has told friends that she does not expect the national security adviser to stand between her and the president.

(More here.)

U.S. Intelligence Focuses on Pakistani Group

By MARK MAZZETTI and SALMAN MASOOD
NYT

WASHINGTON — American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday that there was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group based in Kashmir, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for this week’s deadly attacks in Mumbai.

The officials cautioned that they had reached no firm conclusions about who was responsible for the attacks, or how they were planned and carried out. Nevertheless, they said that evidence gathered in the past two days pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba or possibly another group based in Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad, which also has a track record of attacks against India.

The officials requested anonymity in describing their current thinking and declined to discuss specifics of the intelligence that they said pointed to Kashmiri militants. In the past, the American and Indian intelligence services have used communications intercepts to tie Kashmiri militants to terrorist strikes. Indian officials may also be gleaning information from at least one captured gunman who participated in the Mumbai attacks.

According to one Indian intelligence official, during the siege the militants have been using non-Indian cellphones and receiving calls from outside the country, evidence that in part led Indian officials to speak publicly about the militants’ external ties.

(More here.)

The Last Recount

In Al Franken's race in Minnesota, blue and red tangle for the final time in the Bush era

MATT TAIBBI
Rolling Stone

Posted Dec 11, 2008

On a Saturday in mid-November, Al Franken stands in front of a roomful of volunteers at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The former comedian and talk-show host knows that his campaign troops are fired up over the recount of his race to unseat the state's Republican senator, Norm Coleman. The official tally ended in a virtual tie, with Coleman leading by only 215 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast — a margin of seven-thousandth of one percent. To Franken's campaign volunteers, it seems like Florida 2000 all over again.

The ballot recount, which is mandated by state law, is expected to last well into December — keeping painfully alive the already insanely protracted season of electoral combat between Democrats and Republicans. But rather than throwing red meat to the assembled volunteers, Franken is actually trying to calm them down. Walking back and forth, he leads them in a mock war chant that tweaks the old red-blue outrage:

"What do we want?" Franken shouts.
"PATIENCE!" the volunteers respond.
"When do we want it?" Franken asks.
"NOW!" the crowd demands.

Franken turns to former Clinton adviser Paul Begala, whom he has invited to the meeting to talk about the recount. "You like that?" he says, beaming. "It's the only dada version of that meme."

Here's where things start to sound a little less like Florida in 2000 and a little more like Grant Park in 2008. In the eight years since the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George Bush, there has been very little humor anywhere, on either side of the hottest political battles: Whether it was the launch of the war in Iraq, or the opening night of Fahrenheit 9/11, or the trial of Scooter Libby, the operating vibe has always been earnest, bitter anger. When it came to Blue against Red, you just didn't joke about how much you hated the other side; you were just too pissed off to laugh about What They Did to This Country.

(More here.)

Obama's Declaration Of Independence

The president-elect's appointments reflect his confidence in his own idiosyncratic blueprint and his ability to hold together an eclectic administration.

Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008
by Ronald Brownstein
National Journal

The most intriguing trend in Barack Obama's early appointments is the absence of a conventional political design.

There's been no pattern of placating party constituencies or even of consistently favoring early supporters. Obama hasn't tied himself in knots, as Bill Clinton did, by self-consciously trying to appoint an "administration that looks like America." Yet women and minorities are steadily moving into key positions. Obama has mixed long-standing confidantes with people he might not have recognized a year ago in the Senate elevator.

If there is a diagram to Obama's choices, it's idiosyncratic and personal. Obama doesn't seem to be responding to anyone's vision of what his inner circle should look like except his own. And that may provide a much larger clue to his thinking as he nears the presidency. These first decisions could be read as a declaration of independence. They suggest that Obama feels unusual latitude to set his course without overly deferring to his party's traditional power centers, or even to the expectations of those who helped elect him.

That attitude ripples through Obama's first personnel decisions. Yes, he's already tapped for key White House jobs prominent campaign aides such as David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs and Valerie Jarrett, and he's slated for Cabinet positions some high-profile supporters from the Democratic primaries, including Tom Daschle and Janet Napolitano.

(More here.)

Wolff: Murdoch ‘absolutely despises’ O’Reilly

from Michael Calerone's blog
Politico

In Michael Wolff’s forthcoming biography of Rupert Murdoch, “The Man Who Owns The News,” the author writes that the media mogul has seemed to turn away lately from his cable news network, and isn’t fond its top-rated personality, Bill O’Reilly.

“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."

“The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”

(More here. Here's the Vanity Fair article:)

The Secrets of His Succession

With six children from three marriages, Rupert Murdoch’s family is a source of endless drama and speculation—most recently about his attractive third wife, Wendi Deng, and their two kids—its dynamics tightly bound to his News Corp. empire. In an excerpt from his forthcoming book about Murdoch’s takeover of The Wall Street Journal, Michael Wolff has an inside look at the shifting power struggles and emotional inheritances of Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan, and James Murdoch, as well as Deng’s ascent, for a portrait of that rare phenomenon: the 21st-century dynasty.

by MICHAEL WOLFF

Excerpted from The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, by Michael Wolff, to be published in December by Broadway Books; © 2008 by the author.

As cautionary tales go, you could hardly find a more hothouse example of families gone awry, of genetic dumbing down, and of the despairing results of idle hands than newspaper families.

The Bancrofts, the old-line Wasp family that had controlled The Wall Street Journal for more than 100 years, had sunk into terminal dysfunction. This was News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch’s opportunity. Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, had long coveted above all else two things: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Now, finally, in the spring of 2007, having studied the Bancroft family’s weaknesses, he believed one of them could be his.

Another benefit of dealing with the hapless Bancroft family was that it made him feel so much better about the dysfunction in his own family (dysfunction is a modish word that irritates him—he uses it only because his children say it so often). The Murdochs, who have had their problems, are not, he is confident, heading in the Bancrofts’ direction—not yet.

(The rest is here.)

Bush's Last Days: The Lamest Duck

By JOE KLEIN
TIME

We have "only one President at a time," Barack Obama said in his debut press conference as President-elect. Normally, that would be a safe assumption — but we're learning not to assume anything as the charcoal-dreary economic winter approaches. By mid-November, with the financial crisis growing worse by the day, it had become obvious that one President was no longer enough (at least not the President we had). So, in the days before Thanksgiving, Obama began to move — if not to take charge outright, then at least to preview what things will be like when he does take over in January. He became a more public presence, taking questions from the press three days in a row. He named his economic team. He promised an enormous stimulus package that would somehow create 2.5 million new jobs, and began to maneuver the new Congress toward having the bill ready for him to sign — in a dramatic ceremony, no doubt — as soon as he assumes office.

That we have slightly more than one President for the moment is mostly a consequence of the extraordinary economic times. Even if George Washington were the incumbent, the markets would want to know what John Adams was planning to do after his Inauguration. And yet this final humiliation seems particularly appropriate for George W. Bush. At the end of a presidency of stupefying ineptitude, he has become the lamest of all possible ducks. (See TIME's best pictures of Barack Obama.)

It is in the nature of mainstream journalism to attempt to be kind to Presidents when they are coming and going but to be fiercely skeptical in between. I've been feeling sorry for Bush lately, a feeling partly induced by recent fictional depictions of the President as an amiable lunkhead in Oliver Stone's W. and in Curtis Sittenfeld's terrific novel American Wife. There was a photo in the New York Times that seemed to sum up his current circumstance: Bush in Peru, dressed in an alpaca poncho, standing alone just after the photo op at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, with various Asian leaders departing the stage, none of them making eye contact with him. Bush has that forlorn what-the-hell-happened? expression on his face, the one that has marked his presidency at difficult times. You never want to see the President of the United States looking like that.

(More here.)

Milton Friedman's Role and His Influence on the Two Worst Regimes in US History

frpm Existentialist Cowboy

As recently as 2005, Milton Friedman was still singing the praises of utterly failed economic policies that had been put to the test by Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr and found tragically lacking. Friedman is enamored with policies that bankrupted the nation, made terrorism worse, created the longest, deepest recession since the crash of 1929, exported jobs abroad and resulted in the destruction of the American labor movement and, as a result, the loss of employee rights. Because Ronald Reagan put into effect the lame-brained ideas of Milton Friedman, we live poised on the precipice of economic collapse at the end of the very worst Presidency in American history. (TM note: Friedman died in Nov. 2006.)

When I met Milton Friedman in Houston, Ronald Reagan had not yet plunged the nation into a two year long depression. At the time, it was the worst depression since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression of the 1930s, the one that your parents, grand-parents or great grand parents have told you about.

Not surprisingly, Milton Friedman was singing the praises of GOP economics for which he must share responsibility, possibly blame. When I asked him about a pernicious trend that had started under Reagan, he was defensive. "Jobs are NOT exported", he said emphatically. He was wrong then and he is wrong now. In fact, it was during Ronald Reagan that jobs declined as US industry lost markets to Japan and China --Faustian bargains cut first on Nixon's behalf and later for Herr Reagan.

(More here.)

Cyber-attack on Defense Department computers raises concerns

The 'malware' strike, thought to be from inside Russia, hit combat zone computers and the U.S. Central Command overseeing Iraq and Afghanistan. The attack underscores concerns about computer warfare.

By Julian E. Barnes
LA Times
November 28, 2008

Reporting from Washington — Senior military leaders took the exceptional step of briefing President Bush this week on a severe and widespread electronic attack on Defense Department computers that may have originated in Russia -- an incursion that posed unusual concern among commanders and raised potential implications for national security.

Defense officials would not describe the extent of damage inflicted on military networks. But they said that the attack struck hard at networks within U.S. Central Command, the headquarters that oversees U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, and affected computers in combat zones. The attack also penetrated at least one highly protected classified network.

Military computers are regularly beset by outside hackers, computer viruses and worms. But defense officials said the most recent attack involved an intrusive piece of malicious software, or "malware," apparently designed specifically to target military networks.

"This one was significant; this one got our attention," said one defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing internal assessments.


(More here.)

Lest We Forget

By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT

A few months ago I found myself at a meeting of economists and finance officials, discussing — what else? — the crisis. There was a lot of soul-searching going on. One senior policy maker asked, “Why didn’t we see this coming?”

There was, of course, only one thing to say in reply, so I said it: “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”

Seriously, though, the official had a point. Some people say that the current crisis is unprecedented, but the truth is that there were plenty of precedents, some of them of very recent vintage. Yet these precedents were ignored. And the story of how “we” failed to see this coming has a clear policy implication — namely, that financial market reform should be pressed quickly, that it shouldn’t wait until the crisis is resolved.

About those precedents: Why did so many observers dismiss the obvious signs of a housing bubble, even though the 1990s dot-com bubble was fresh in our memories?

(More here.)

Stimulus for Skeptics

By DAVID BROOKS
NYT

Over the past year, the federal government has poured money into the economy hundreds of billions of dollars at a time. It has also guaranteed investments, loans and deposits worth about $8 trillion. Barry Ritholtz, the author of “Bailout Na